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Bryn Mawr Mineralogy Wiki talk:Community Portal
Category:Community This is the general discussion page for the wiki! New founders should leave a nice welcome message and encourage new visitors and editors to leave a note to get the conversation started. ---- Welcome to the Mineral Wiki! This is the Bryn Mawr College Student Mineral Wiki page! You have probably navigated here because you are a student enrolled in Mineralogy or Petrology at Bryn Mawr (or because you are interested in learning about minerals, in which case you are welcome to look around but won't be able to make edits). To edit the site, you will need admin privileges. Navigate to the admin request forum by rolling your mouse over the "Community" menu above and clicking on "Forum"; then click "Help Desk" and on the topic "Requesting admin privileges." (You can also just go here, but it's worth learning how to navigate using the menus.) Once there, you can edit the forum post to add your request; be sure to type four tildas (~) or click the "Signature" button so your username signs the request and I can find you. When editing, please keep in mind a few things. The purpose of this site is to create your own class resource, focused on the materials that are most useful to you in that context, so we want to keep it protected from general internet-wide editing. You can edit a page by navigating to that page and clicking on the "Edit" button; if instead you click the drop-down menu arrow, you can choose a "Protect" option. Please make sure that only administrators can edit the page, and then save that condition. Please also be sure to give proper credit for your sources of information, whether they be textbooks, online resources, or other sources. A numbered footnote is a good way to refer to sources. It's bad internet etiquette to "hotlink" to images (i.e. insert an image using "img src" code and an external URL), unless the image is an active link to the original and the caption includes a weblink citation. When referencing sources, note that if your source is a published, print journal article that is also available online, the correct reference format refers to the printed journal, not the online version as just a URL. Some of the pages imported from the old Blackboard wiki did not properly import images from those pages. You can still access the old wiki within Blackboard (though you can't edit it there), which means you can download the picture that was originally inserted and then upload it again to this externally-hosted wiki. You can also edit the old pages completely and look for or take new photomicrographs! In some cases there were several pages in the old wiki on the same topic, and during the migration I merged those into a single page, which means there is also some redundancy. You may want to delete and consolidate text to clean that up. Finally, when editing, by clicking on the Control button that says "Source," you can edit the html for that page directly. This is the easiest way to insert superscript and subscript text, using the "super" and "sub" commands. If you are unfamiliar with basic html, I can give you a quick and dirty tutorial. (So can the internet.) Lelkins 15:43, January 5, 2011 (UTC) Possible topics of interest There are a lot of things you might decide are useful to include on the site for a given mineral. You may decide that some of these topics are not helpful for that particular mineral, and choose not to include them. This is at your discretion. If you don't think something is necessary but someone else finds it helpful, err on the side of more complete information! But since the idea is not to just recreate sites like mindat.org, but rather to create a resource that is most helpful for you in the context of your class and learning, you might not want to include every detail that you can find about every mineral. Possible topics include: *Mineral formula *Crystal system *Unit cell dimensions *Crystal habit(s) *Cleavage *Twinning *Color and pleochroism *Relief in thin section *Optic sign *2V *Optic axis orientations *Elongation (length fast or length slow) *Refractive indices *Maximum birefringence *Distinguishing features (how to tell it from other minerals) *Occurrence (what rocks can host the mineral? What minerals are commonly associated with it?) *Hand sample characteristics (hardness, streak, magnetism, luster) *Hand sample images (with scale and caption) *Photomicrographs in plane and cross-polarized light (with scale and caption) Take credit for your work! In addition to properly citing and referencing sources that you used, be sure to list yourself as an editor of the page. You can do this easily with the "Signature" button or by typing four tildas (~). Lelkins 15:42, January 5, 2011 (UTC)